The Pretty Reckless vocalist Taylor Momsen has spoken about the challenges she faces when singing her hero Chris Cornell‘s songs with Soundgarden.
Momsen cites the Seattle grunge legends as one of the bands who changed her life, and in a new interview with YouTube star Rick Beato she admits that she was “elated” when she was told that her band had been offered the opportunity to support Soundgarden on their 2017 US tour.
“Every time I listen to a Soundgarden record, I discover something new inside of it,” she tells the podcast host. “There’s certain music where it feels like the artist is speaking for you, or to you, in a way that you maybe don’t know how to communicate yourself, and Soundgarden has always done that for me.”
Understandably, Momsen says she was “devastated” by Chris Cornell’s death by suicide on that 2017 King Animal tour. Subsequently, she has honoured Cornell’s life and music by performing with Soundgarden’s three surviving members on a number of occasions.
In January 2019, Momsen sang three songs – Rusty Cage, Drawing Flies and Loud Love – at the star-studded I Am The Highway memorial concert in Los Angeles, and in 2022, she joined members of Soundgarden, Foo Fighters and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic to sing The Day I Tried To Live and Black Hole Sun at the Los Angeles staging of the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert.
She also sang with the band at their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2025, and more recently, on September 9 this year, joined the trio, and Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready, for a half-time show performance at the Seattle Seahawks season-opening game against the New England Patriots.
“Every time we’ve done this, it’s been pressure,” Momsen admits, before going on to say that, performing with the group at their RARHOF induction, that pressure was mixed with “love and excitement and pride”.
“I was coming from a perspective and a place of just, like, pure and utter joy for them,” she says. “Every time they ask me to sing with them it’s an honour.”
“Individually they’re all the greatest musicians in the world,” she continues, “and then you put them together and it creates this unparalleled sound.”
Finding a place within this sound, Momsen admits, is a challenge in itself.
“Matt [Cameron] always cracks me up,” she tells Beato, “because he goes, ‘But you’re a huge fan, so you know these songs.’ And I go, Yes, I know them, but knowing them and then removing the vocal, and doing them and accomplishing them are two very different things.”
“Everyone thinks it’s the notes and it’s like, no, it’s the fucking time signatures. Soundgarden, it sounds like it’s just flowing when you’re listening, you don’t even realise they’ve changed it until you remove something, and have to actually do it, and then you go, Wait a second. What the fuck just happened?”
Watch the interview in full below.